Blessed Are They That Mourn
by Ballades
Summary: Cassandra tries to deal with immeasurable loss after the Temple of Sacred Ashes and everyone in it is destroyed.


TRIGGER WARNING: Exploding buildings and the smell, loss.

(Comments always loved and appreciated.)

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"You fool."

Galyan smiles at her from the bed, green eyes dancing. "Now now Cassandra, don't you think after knowing each other so long that we'd be past this point? Am I a mere fool now?"

She snorts. "All right. You _lovable_ fool. Is that better?"

"Much." Galyan rolls onto his side, props himself up on an elbow, watches her pick articles of clothing off the floor. Cassandra dresses quickly and efficiently, pulling her shirt on hard enough to muss her hair, hopping into her breeches without even a wiggle, accordioning up her socks and shoving toes roughly into them. When she turns she sees Galyan still has his eyes on her, and they are sad, sad and wistful, as they usually are when she has to leave him.

She feels a pang of regret. She shouldn't be in such a hurry to leave, no matter how important her business. Her impatience will forever be her worst trait, she fears. "I'm sorry," she says to him, going back to the bed, sitting on its edge. "I should not have been so cavalier with you. That was unworthy of me."

Galyan reaches out, lets his hand rest atop her thigh. "I shouldn't have put you on the spot. Though I do hope you'll consider it. Even if it's something so simple as asking Most Holy to speak a few words in front of us."

Cassandra takes his hand in hers, lifts it, presses the backs of his fingers to her lips. His mouth curves into a smile, and she smiles back at him, her heart aflutter. Galyan is, even after twenty years, still handsome and easygoing, always ready with a winsome smile that crinkles the laugh lines around his eyes and shows his white, white teeth. Galyan, her dearest, beloved Galyan, now with hair cut short like hers, his temples and beard graying, will always know what to say to ease her troubles and soothe her mind, knows her moods enough to disarm them before they begin to build.

Cassandra has long grown to accept that Galyan is her home, and no matter how much time she spends away, she is always glad to be back.

Which is why she shouldn't be so eager to go. She has only been in Val Royeaux for a few blissful, happy days, and truly she wishes for more. But her business in Kirkwall is urgent. "Perhaps after the Conclave," Cassandra allows. "I do not know why you are asking now, Galyan. Do we need to prove our relationship? Have we not been constant to each other all these years?"

"We have," he says, "but sometimes, I feel as if...well, I can't really explain it. I have a feeling, Cassandra, and I mislike it. Something stirs. If anything happens, I want to go knowing that you and I are together in all things."

"Galyan," Cassandra says firmly. "Do not speak such nonsense. What does it matter if we are married or not? I know whom I love, and I thank the Maker every day for it."

Galyan chuckles, pulls her hand near, returns her gesture, his lips warm upon her skin. "Why, Cassandra, I thought _you_ were the romantic. I've been mistaken all this time."

Cassandra blushes. "You tease me. Very well, I will ask Most Holy once the Conclave is finished. And then after that we shall be an old married couple, biting and snapping at each other over tea."

"Maker forfend. I fully intend to explore the other stages of marriage before arriving at that one. Hopefully, it will be when we are too old and wrinkly to care anymore, and we can spend our days sitting in a garden somewhere while you criticize the swordplay of new recruits." Galyan smiles tenderly.

A rush of affection overtakes her, and Cassandra lies back down, gets under the covers, slides fingers over his chest until her hands are in full contact. She kisses him gently on the lips. "One month," she tells him, moving so that Galyan can shift over her. "One month, and I will find you at Haven, and we will go to Justinia."

They slip into silence, their mouths occupied. Piece by piece, Cassandra's clothing returns to the floor.

One month later, Cassandra watches her life evaporate into misty green, the explosion blowing her vaporized history into the yawning gulf of the Breach.

A hoarse scream rips its way out of her, gets shunted away by the shockwave. Cassandra takes a breath, falls to her hands and knees, screams again, a wordless cry of anguish. _Galyan, oh, _**_Galyan_**_! Maker _**_no_**_, Maker _**_why_**_?!_ She screams yet again, her entire body taut and trembling, the immensity of what's happened crushing her. Gone, he's _gone_, the Temple is leveled and smoking, no one could have survived it. Gone, all gone in just a second, a fleeting moment of time, twenty years of her life now swirling up in motes, scattering over a wasteland of burning corpses and ash.

Horror, she feels horror like never before, shadowy little hands writhing up from that heavy, desperate place in her chest, swarming up her neck, winding cruel fingers around her throat, choking her. Cassandra sobs hard enough to gag; she retches, vomits grief upon the ground, acid bile splashing onto her gloves. She adds tears to the mixture, searing, scalding tears that blind her, pour out of her, cascading across the bridge of her nose and falling in a glittering emerald stream. _Galyan, no! Galyan!_ is all she can think, _twenty years was not enough, my love, twenty years, half my life but all my heart, gone, Maker why? Why?_

It is Leliana who grabs her around the shoulders, Leliana who forces Cassandra to stand, Leliana whose face is shining also with tears, her mouth a wide, horizontal rent from which ragged breaths issue. Leliana points to the giant rift, her mouth moving, but Cassandra can't hear her through the din of her heartbreak. Leliana takes her hand instead and pulls her along, runs, stumbling and tripping, towards the place where demons are dropping out of the sky.

They rush towards the epicenter. Cassandra draws her sword, sees a demon in the distance, but as she gets near she stops short as if she has struck a wall. The smell, the _smell_, it's of embers and dust, brick-dust, masonry, ash, people, _people._ In her nose, in her mouth, in her _lungs_, Maker _help, please_, there are people in her lungs, she is breathing them in and suffocating on them. Cassandra turns to the side and dry-heaves, but there is nothing left, only her roiling emotions and the faint sounds of residual shrieks.

Rage, that's what she needs now, rage so she can fight, rage so she can survive long enough to throw herself at the hole in the sky and join Galyan in the Fade. Rage is something Cassandra knows so well, and she reaches into herself, uncages it, roars it out, the tendons of her neck springing up under her skin, her arms cording out with the force of it. If she hits the demons hard enough maybe she can send them back where they came from, push them back in time, back to when she was giddy with the anticipation of getting married. If she hits them hard enough maybe they'll all come after her, pile onto her and take her down, and she can be where Galyan is, where she should be, her soul rising, turning into particles on the wind.

Instead she lives, keeps going somehow, and three days later the Herald falls at their feet. Three days, but it's felt so much longer, three days of a hellish, nightmarish existence forever tainted by a sickening green and the smell of charred bodies. Three days of telling herself that in the next two seconds someone will tell her it's all a joke, and that Galyan has survived. If not the next two seconds, then the next two minutes, and he'll come around the corner, face alight with a smile, and take her into his arms. If not the next two minutes, then the next two hours, and Cassandra will forgive him for taking so long because he's probably injured. If not the next two hours, then the next twenty hours, the next two days, and so on and so on until Cassandra is jumping at every shadow and hallucinating Galyan's face, superimposing his features on everyone she sees.

Gone, it's all gone. Cassandra has a lifetime of knowledge she will never again use. She knows by touch and smell and taste a body that no longer exists, knows the cadence of footsteps she will not hear again. The comfort of his warmth, the steadiness which anchors her, the wit that keeps her laughing, all of it is useless information now, her decades-long education no longer applicable.

Time passes, interminable. There's the Herald, and Cassandra says things to her, goes with her to the Temple to seal the rift, fights a pride demon, somehow manages to function. She does things in a haze, comes back at night to her solitude and mourning and her grief unending, curls into a ball on her bed and wonders, sleepless, when Galyan will return.

Galyan isn't coming back, and Cassandra doesn't know what to do with the pieces of her heart, broken beyond repair. She has only memories, like the first time she and Galyan learned each other, discovered wonder and delight in the fit of their bodies, revealed the divinity in the sounds of laughter and love. She has memories of starlit skin and peaceful sleep, staff-worn hands with calloused thumbs, teasing and silly jokes told only to each other. She recalls his letters, so cleverly enchanted, spelled so that they could hold his voice and she could hear him say _you're _**_delightful_**_, I love you, have faith in the Maker._ She remembers his eyes, darkened with desire, looking up over her body while his lips touch the wound he healed on her thigh; remembers their soaring, fearful joy followed by tearful, bloody sadness, Galyan's hands on her abdomen, easing her pain as she lies with her head in his lap, salty raindrops on her cheek.

Her memories are now the coldest comfort, a twenty-year-old mausoleum in which is interred a life abruptly snatched away. Cassandra goes on, but she doesn't know how she can ever be whole when two decades of her are now nothing more than wind and earth. Without him, she fears, she is nothing. Without him, she has nothing.

Cassandra thinks bitterly about her life and how it's been full of people taken from her too soon.

Cassandra prays.


End file.
